Winter Sun

A cold sharp light
Cuts up the gray sky
Until it bleeds blue.

The birds get confused.
Their loud chattering
Sounds like panic.

On the wet grass
A shadow settles in
Like a dazed snake.

So much light
Makes me squint
Through my depression.

My mood craves gray,
Not this damn
Blue blood.

Charles Deemer

Jimmy Yancey

Perhaps more than any other pianist, Yancey plays in the laid-back bluesy boogie-woogie style to which I aspire.

Jimmy Yancey is the progenitor of boogie-woogie piano, a style that eventually became a recognizable element of uptempo blues and early rock and roll. The boogie-woogie craze came and went in the latter half of the Thirties, but Yancey had actually been playing in that style as far back as the 1910s and 1920s. A self-taught pianist, singer and dancer, he performed in a style characterized by rolling, rhythmic lines from his left hand played off against percussive accents from the right hand.

Read full story.

Bio with sample music link.

Office hours

The productive day continues. First, wrote a short poem, "Winter Sun." Needs polishing but a good start. Wrote more on the libretto. Started a new chapter on Sally. And even wrote a tad on a screenplay I started some weeks back. Then a student came by, wondering if a writer could make a living, and I was able, first, to say, Well, I got a royalty check in the mail today ... and second, it depends. A "staff writer" for a publication makes a living easier than a creative writer or a freelance writer. I made a decent living as managing editor of a magazine. However, after the first year or two, I hated it because it took energy away from writing plays. When I quit to support myself freelancing, I made less money but had more freedom -- and, something I hadn't foreseen, also had considerably more stress. Freelancing is the hardest work I've ever done, the hard work being marketing yourself and future pieces, having to keep ahead of yourself to pay all your bills. It's even harder to make a living as a "creative writer." Well, it's time to get to class...

High productivity

From a day of funk yesterday to a morning of great productivity today! Who can figure? After the chapter on Sally, I got a great start on the new comic libretto -- indeed, I think I have it all mapped out in my head and the first sequence done on paper. Well, not paper.

I also found time to install some programs on my new toy, a SanDisk flash drive with U3 technology. I've had an earlier model for a while now and live by it, especially in my university office (where the office computer almost becomes my own via the drive), and I don't need extra space (writers seldom do) but I was sold on a newer model by two things: the retractable connection so I don't need caps, which I was always losing; and the U3 technology that permits special programs to go on the disk. I loaded a simple word processor and some desk assistant utilities. It's a 1G disk (my earlier, 512K, was only half full), so I still have more space than I know what to do with. I love the new features and can't wait to try it out at work today.

In class we'll be reading the trailers I asked them to write for their projects. I only have four more classes! This term has sprinted by.

P.S. Later ... the damn firewall at the university appears to be inhibiting some of the special features of the new flash drive. I can use it in the "old" way but not sure I can use its special features here.

Selected lyrics by Tom Lehrer

Teasers for the uninitiated...

From She's My Girl:
Sharks gotta swim, and bats gotta fly,
I gotta love one woman till I die.
To Ed or Dick or Bob,
She may be just a slob,
But to me, well,
She's my girl.

From The Vatican Rag:
So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman;
Ave Maria,
Gee, it's good to see ya.
Gettin' ecstatic an' sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican
Rag!


From Lobachevsky:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".

From The Hunting Song:
I always will remember,
'Twas a year ago November,
I went out to hunt some deer
On a morning bright and clear.
I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

From Be Prepared!:
Be prepared! That's the Boy Scouts' marching song,
Be prepared! As through life you march along.
Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well.
Don't write naughty words on walls if you can't spell.

Be prepared! To hide that pack of cigarettes.
Don't make book if you cannot cover bets.
Keep those reefers hidden where you're sure that they will not be found,
And be careful not to smoke them when the scoutmaster's around,**
For he only will insist that they be shared, be prepared!

From When You Are Old And Gray:
An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I'll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability.
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility.
So let's act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we'll soon reach senility
And lose the ability.

Your teeth will start to go, dear,
Your waist will start to spread.
In twenty years or so, dear,
I'll wish that you were dead.

From My Home Town:
No fellow could ignore
The little girl next door,
She sure looked sweet in her first evening gown.
Now there's a charge for what she used to give for free
In my home town.

From I Hold Your Hand In Mine:
I hold your hand in mine, dear,
I press it to my lips.
I take a healthy bite
From your dainty fingertips.

My joy would be complete, dear,
If you were only here,
But still I keep your hand
As a precious souvenir.

From Oedipus Rex:
So be sweet and kind to mother,
Now and then have a chat.
Buy her candy or some flowers,
Or a brand new hat.
But maybe you had better let it go at that.

Or you may find yourself with a quite complex complex
And you may end up like Oedipus.
I'd rather marry a duck-billed platypus
Than end up like old Oedipus Rex.

I heard it only once at a party, but there also exists a "bootleg" collection of x-rated songs by Lehrer. He also assembled a classical piece containing most of the cliches of classical music. The name "The Cliche Symphony" comes to mind but it must be wrong because a search with this title doesn't turn up anything. Anybody know the name of this? I heard it on the car radio only once and almost crashed into a tree it was so hilarious.


A conversation with Tom Lehrer.

The Writing Trance

I managed to wake up in a trance and keep in it long enough to dash off a chapter in Sally this morning. Writing often happens this way: you wake in a writing-set, dreamlike consciousness, and the trick is to keep in that mental space until you get the writing down. A myriad of things surround you as potential distraction. You have to keep focused, stay in the trance, or the job is going to be more tedious, the ride more bumpy, and everything will take longer. This is why living alone is so good for a writer. Not so good for a life, but good for a writer. The compromise, of course, is "a room of one's own," where the writer disappears and manages the writing trance without interruption.

Sally isn't going well, by the way. This book is going to be a real pain in the ass, but I'm determined to hang in. There are parts I like a lot. I just have to figure out how to fill the rest of the space with the same. But this draft is a bumpy ride and I think the draft itself will not be as close as my drafts sometimes are to where I actually want to be.

I think I'm going to get right on the new Maupassant libretto for my relief from Sally and back-burner the other prose projects until Sally is farther along. I have a month off after this term, and I'd love to be in good rhythm so I can get a lot done on it. I need this project to get fun again. Yes, writing a dark depressing book can be fun ha ha! It's the craft that makes it fun.

Yes, onward to a comic libretto! A fat man who hatches chickens! Just what I need.

P.S. I finished the new poem but don't think much of it.

The Genius of Tom Lehrer

I don't know why Lehrer has been so much on my mind today. Maybe because I've been in a funk and needed cheering up. Probably because I'm learning, or trying to, my first Lehrer song on the piano ("Be Prepared"). I am proud to say that I was a fan from the start, at 13 an eager owner of Lehrer's original 10-inch LP, which I played endlessly. I saw him in concert before he became famous, when he was still a young Harvard professor with a hobby. When he made it big as an entertainer, I took my first away-from-home trip in the family car to drive from LA to Palo Alto to see Lehrer perform at Stanford. He was late and it was one of the first times he used what became a standard introduction to his shows. In those days, I was a groupy of two people: Tom Lehrer and Linus Pauling. I followed them everywhere.

Much later I had a long phone chat with Lehrer, which I've talked about here before. It was like meeting a hero. He was impressed that I'd been at that 1958 or 1959 Stanford show. He was impressed I bought his first album in 1953. I had true fan credentials.

Lehrer's imitators like Mark Russell can't carry his shoes. It's the difference between genius and cleverness. In his rhymes, no one matches Lehrer technically, nor in his musical/melodic satire, nor in his biting social and political commentary. He has not been matched. You have to go back to Jonathan Swift to find such a fierce wit.

Do I sound like a fan?

Lyrics to songs

102 days until...

Experience

Some men break your heart in two,
Some men fawn and flatter,
Some men never look at you;
And that cleans up the matter.

Dorothy Parker

The Epistemological Uncle

I used this title in a short story published in 1994. Now I find myself working on a poem with the same title.

Writers often recirculate ideas like this. In fact, "the epistemological uncle" is based on a real character, my late soul-brother Dick's uncle. Pete, I believe it was. I met him only once, at the Lumberman's Bar in Orofino, Idaho. Uncle Pete was a long-gone alcoholic who had a habit of rearing back and howling, "Do you really knoooooooooooooooow!?!" He had perfect timing for the gesture, usually interrupting a heated barroom discussion about religion or politics. Do you really knoooooooooooooooooooooooow?!? Pete would howl, just before the fighting was about to begin -- and thus be a kind of peacemaker. He cracked me and Dick up.

After my story was published decades after I met Uncle Pete, "the epistemological uncle" became code between Dick and me, broadening its meaning to something like "Can you believe this shit?" After one of us used the code, we inevitably cracked up together.

I don't know if the poem I started will go anywhere. I'll know in a few days. Imagine that: a few days! If I were talking about a novel, this would mean "in a year or more."

Moby Dick published -- and trashed

From Today In Literature:

On this day in 1851 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in the United States. The British edition had been published the previous month, with a botched ending; the American edition corrected this, but even if the American reviewers read to the end they sided with the British: "...so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature."

Read full story.

Melville expressed much of his disappointment at the failure of his masterpiece in his next novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities with fierce satirizing of publishers and popular taste. In the mid-60s, as I was getting ready to go to graduate school, Pierre was still considered a failure, even as Moby Dick finally had been recognized as a master work. I disagree, believing like a recent critic that Pierre was "surely the finest psychological novel anyone had yet written in English," not a mainstream view in the 60s. This argument -- ground-breaking, I thought, with usual graduate student audacity -- was going to become my Ph.D. thesis. And off I went to the University of Oregon in 1966 to write just this.

My first year in grad school I was shocked to learn that someone had beat me to the punch! A grad student at the University of Michigan had made the same argument in a new Ph.D. thesis, which I found on microfilm. I expressed my frustration to my advisor, threatening to drop out of school, but the dear professor calmed me down, told me this was par for the course, and suggested I look to the Transcendentalists for a thesis because in several years, just as I got my doctorate, experts of this era would be in great demand (he was right!). I thought about it but then my personal life added fuel to the fire, and I dropped out anyway. I'd return a year later as an MFA candidate in fiction.

So the failure of Moby Dick, which fed Melville's biting satire in Pierre, which attracted me to grad school in the first place, all have personal echoes with me. Had the University of Michigan guy not beat me to the punch, would I be a retired Melville scholar today? Hard to say. My life, like many lives, maybe all lives, is full of little accidents like this.

Autobiography

I have a leak in my soul
And through it my character flows
Drip by drip. The Yellow Pages
Do not list Plumbers
For the Soul. The sages
At church have much to say
On this matter but nothing
They know makes sense to me.

I have a crack in my heart
Through which my spirit wants
To go. The wages of sleep
Do not pay the rent. Dreams
Without spirit do not spend.
A spirit lost is a spirit gone.
I have a leak in my soul
And through it my character flows.

I have a rent in my mind
And everything unwinds.
I don’t know where I’ve been.
I don’t know where I go.
I have a leak in my soul
And through it my character flows
Into the vast unknown
Far, so far, from home.

Charles Deemer

Naked finger

For the first time since 1998, I'm not wearing my wedding ring. Off to a craftsman's shop for some repairs. Definitely feel strange without it, like I'm missing a glove or something. My left hand feels cold.

Origins of the wedding ring.

Down, demons, down!

Marie's memorial unleashed a lot of ghosts and demons, which have been haunting me all day. A good sports feel-good story like this is just what I need. I admire Lorena Ochoa because she has a ton of class. Besides being good, she is soft-spoken, focused, consistent -- all the things a teenager like Michelle Wie is not (but might become if she chooses the right mentors). There's precious little class in sports any more (but certainly more in women's sports than men's and more in "minor" sports than the big three majors), so I celebrate it whenever I see it. This award is well deserved:

Ochoa Wraps Up Player of the Year Award

The Associated Press

Lorena Ochoa wrapped up the LPGA Tour's player of the year award with a record-setting finish in the Tournament of Champions. The 24-year-old Mexican star shot a 7-under 65 on Sunday for a 10-stroke victory and a tournament-record 21-under 267 total. She ran her winning streak to three with her sixth victory of the year and earned $150,000 for a season total of $2,492,872.

'Winning this tournament was very special,' Ochoa said. 'I think this is going to be a place I will remember for the rest of my life and just achieving my goal of being the best player in 2006.'


Read complete story

Off to cook dinner tonight, another activity that wards off demons. Demons like the Great Questions of Life, not the wonderful little moments like going to the copy center, grabbing a cup of coffee, or making dinner. Keep focused on the small & immediate.

Gone but not ... remembered?

Well over a hundred folks attended Marie's memorial service. She was well liked and well connected. In February, 2003, less than a dozen came to the memorial service I led for my best friend in Portland, Ger Moran. He was retired, a bachelor, a reclusive poet, estranged from his only sister. Moral: if you want a big funeral, have a lot of friends and family.

But Ger didn't want a big funeral. He had a very Eastern philosophy of life. If he's disappointed, it's because his work is so ignored. I edited a posthumous collection of his writings called
Midnight Cabaret: the Writings of Ger Moran but not many have bought it. (Amazon also slapped the wrong title & cover on it, which doesn't help and which is taking forever to correct. The link shows the correct cover.) Ger is gone but probably not remembered by many. The fate of more than we realize, I expect. Here are a couple of poems by Ger:

GESTURE

If I could come before you
With the simplest of miming
Gestures, I would, indeed I would.

This action with pen in hand,
Black ink on white paper,
Appears such a dim sign.

At this moment I realize
The striking clarity of gestural
Power as transcendent--

...and here I sit with these
wanting strokes called words,
groping in the dark to reach you.


BON VOYAGE

Enjoy the world
Because it's yours.
You are the world
And the world is you.

If I die before H, she has instructions about my preferences concerning whatever memorial service may happen. My real memorial is in Special Collections at the University of Oregon Library and online at Ibiblio (University of North Carolina). I'll still have a shot at communication with readers after I'm gone. A more personal legacy than this is more limited. I'm fine with that. It's the future readers I want most. I want some of my words to keep living. I want my words to inspire someone to write their own words (as I have in the past).

I haven't forgotten Ger -- but I'm not sure how many of us are out there.

Theory

Into love and out again,
Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen--
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Some one dropped me on my head?

Dorothy Parker

Surviving the weather hype

For days our local weathermen have been hyping a windstorm "of historic proportions" coming our way, scheduled to hit last night. Well, it did -- but it wasn't anything really major. Sure, a few downed trees in the water-logged ground, some power outages, 40 mph gusts, but nothing to suggest "historic proportions." The weather folks are always exaggerating the weather like that. Part of the Age of Hype.


For an historic storm, you have to go back to October 12, 1962: the Columbus Day Storm, or the "Big Blow":

With little fear of exaggeration, it can be stated that the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 was the most powerful windstorm to strike the Pacific Northwest in the 20th century. Certainly no windstorm since has generated as much widespread devastation as the Big Blow, not even close.

Read full story.

On that occasion, Portland reported a gust of 116 mph. Highest in the state was Newport at 138. 40 mph winds pale by comparison.

All the same, you don't need to make history to be miserable. Even a small storm can cause havoc for some folks. Thus we were lucky. We didn't lose power and although I haven't made the morning rounds outside, I didn't hear any crashing through the night. I assume we got through fine.

P.S. I see on the news that this storm caused much more damage than I imagined, just not in our part of town. Not a killer storm but definitely a big hassle for a lot of folks.

Advertising --> Homo Consumerus

One thing I'm looking forward to when I start writing the libretto based on an American classic is that my story will get to deal with issues raised by the early rise of advertising, a subject I can get passionate about. An historical summary:

* Before 1900, ads were mostly informational. They described products and appealed to consumers logic and judgement. The text (ad copy) was the selling feature of the ad.
* During the 1920's (after W.W.I), advertising started putting more emphasis on emotion and image. The ads emphasized the life of the consumer more than the merits of the product.
* With the growing industrial economy, markets for the goods being produced need to be produced. To create this consumer group, advertising began to promote a sense of anxiety, fear, and inadequacy among the population. Advertisers realized the power in appealing to people on a subconscious level based on image and non-rational thought.

It's the post-WWI change of emphasis that especially interests me, a kind of brainwashing that shaped culture forever after until the culmination today in Homo Consumerus. It's going to be fun to write about the origins of this disaster.

At Marie's Memorial

I stand as still as a corpse and stare at photos,
Playbills, cast lists of forgotten plays
On abandoned stages. If the wages of death is love,
Then love fills this room. But in the corner,
Lurking like a naughty child, is more sadness
Than I want to feel. All the years of the past,
Dripping memories like rank fruit, rot
And fertilize the heart of this place.
So much has changed.
So much has been forgotten.
A lesson earned is not a lesson learned:
Those times were good -- and never can return.

Charles Deemer

What I Think I Need

What I think I need
Is not what I will get.
None will care or heed
Desire's old regret.

What I think I need
Is clear only to me,
As potent as a seed--
Profound simplicity!

What I think I need
Is not what I have known.
I will not succeed
To harness flesh and bone.

Yet I've come close as skin,
A night accompanied
By rapture in a spin--
Almost grasping what I need.

But that was long ago.
What I think I need
Today is moving slow--
And silence as my creed.

Charles Deemer